Joy Amina Garnett is an artist and writer from New York, now living in Los Angeles. Her paintings explore media consumption and the distinctions between documentary versus fine art image-making. Her writings engage memory and dislocation, archives, and alternative histories.
Education: Garnett holds an MFA from the City College of New York and a BA in Humanities from McGill University. She studied literary Arabic as an undergraduate at McGill and at the American University in Cairo’s Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA). After graduating from McGill, she traveled to Paris and enrolled at L’École Nationale Supérieur des Beaux-arts before returning to New York to continue painting while pursuing her Masters at City College.
Fellowships & awards: Garnett’s honors include the Anonymous Was A Woman Award and residencies at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and Creative Commons, Dubrovnik. She has received grants from United States Artists, Therese Ralston McCabe Connor Fund, Chipstone Foundation Milwaukee, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the Wellcome Trust, London, UK. She was awarded a writing fellowship at Yaddo to work on her memoir, The Bee Kingdom (Gaudy Boy, 2026), an excerpt of which was Longlisted for the 2024 First Pages Prize in Creative Nonfiction.
Creative writing: Excerpts from early drafts of The Bee Kingdom, as well as Garnett’s short stories, have appeared in Rusted Radishes, ellipse: journal of translation, Nashville Review, Evergreen Review, Ping-Pong, Two Coats of Paint, Full Blede, and elsewhere.
Archives: Garnett initially developed The Bee Kingdom as an art and archive project, documented at thebeekingdom.art. The visually rich materials left behind by her grandfather, Egyptian poet and beekeeper Ahmed Zaky Abushady (1892-1955), as well as by other family members, include travelogs, diaries, letters, photographs, artworks, ephemera, and various objects. Her book weaves together discoveries revealed by these materials with a coming-of-age story, original research, and fragments of imagined histories. Garnett has been interviewed about her work in ArabLit Quarterly, Hyperallergic, and 3Quarks Daily, and her essays have appeared in Arab Urbanism Magazine, Ibraaz, Bee World, and Baraza.
Editing: Garnett has served as Art Director of Evergreen Review since 2019, and has recently taken on an additional art directorship for SUSPECT, published by the New York City-based nonprofit Singapore Unbound. From 2005-2016, she served as Art Editor of Cultural Politics, a media theory journal published by Duke University Press. In 2005, she launched the first blog and electronic newsletter for Visual AIDS while serving on its board. In the late 1990s, she launched the online guerrilla art news entity known as NEWSgrist—”where spin is art.”
Art writing and scholarship: Garnett launched her first column “Into Africa” (1999-2001) for artnet magazine while working at the Robert Goldwater Library in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. She has written extensively about painting’s relationship to photography and other media, most notoriously in Harper’s, Intelligent Agent, and in her second column “Copy That!” for Art21 Magazine. Her essays can be found in several books and exhibition catalogs, notably: Interaction: Artistic Practice in the Network, edited by Jordan Crandall and Amy Scholder (Eyebeam/DAP, 2001); Under Fire: The Organization and Representation of Violence, edited by Jordan Crandall (Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 2 vols. 2004; 2005); Vertov From V to A, edited by Peggy Ahwesh and Keith Sanborn (Ediciones la Calavera, 2008); Myself: A Conversation about Self-Portraiture, a conversation with Mira Schor (University of Nevada Reno, 2011); M/E/A/N/I/N/G (25th Anniversary Issue) edited by Mira Schor and Susan Bee (University of Pennsylvania and Duke University Press, 2011). Joy has contributed chapters on various topics to books that include: Cultural Entanglement in the Pre-Independence Arab World: Arts, Thought, and Literature (Bloomsbury, 2020); The Artists’ & Writers’ Cookbook (powerHouse Books, 2016); Virilio and Visual Culture, and The Virilio Dictionary (both published in 2013 by Edinburgh University Press); and Virilio Now: Current Perspectives in Virilio Studies (Polity, 2011).
Exhibitions: Garnett’s first solo exhibition of paintings was held at Debs & Co., NY in 1999. Her work has been included in exhibitions at MoMA PS1, Whitney Museum of American Art, FLAG Art Foundation, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Artists Space, Smack Mellon, White Columns, Center for Book Arts, New York Academy of Sciences (all in New York), Milwaukee Art Museum, Bristol Art Museum, Roger Williams University, Museum of Contemporary Craft Portland, Boston University Art Gallery, Savannah College of Art & Design, Rubenstein Arts Center at Duke University, Illinois State University Galleries, Smithsonian traveling exhibitions, National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), Wellcome Trust (London, UK), and the Witte Zaal (Ghent, Belgium).
Collections: Garnett’s paintings are held in the permanent collections of the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC), Altria Group (Richmond, VA), West Collection (Oaks, PA), and in numerous private collections.
Press: Garnett’s paintings have been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Village Voice, New York Magazine, Harper’s, Perspecta: Yale School of Architecture Journal, Time Out NY, Artforum, Art in America, ARTnews, The Brooklyn Rail, artnet, Hyperallergic, The Washington Post, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, The Stranger, Musée Magazine, The Huffington Post, WIRED, Cabinet Magazine, C Magazine, New American Paintings, and Bidoun.
Contact: joy.garnett [@] gmail.com
Joy Amina Garnett 
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